éYEARS OF UPHEAVAL
Détente with the Soviet Union was urged on us insistently when we entered office, hailed as a turning point when we carried it out and later blamed for all our contemporary dilemmas. In the retrospective of a decade, detente is being made to bear the burden for the consequences of America's self-destructive domestic convulsions over Viet Nam and Watergate. The former made Americans recoil before foreign involvement and thus opened an opportunity for Soviet expansionism; the latter weakened Executive power to resist Soviet pressure.
A collective amnesia has seized the participants in that tragedy. Liberals have been reluctant to assume any responsibility for the consequences of their two great causes of the 1970s. Some of the "neoconservatives" who had moved from the liberal to the conservative side after Viet Nam had few incentives to recall their own contributions to the collapse of international restraints. They forgot that they had assaulted as too bellicose the same foreign policy that five years later they denounced as retreat.
Any American President soon learns that he has a narrow margin for maneuver. The U.S. and the Soviet Union are ideological rivals. Détente cannot change that. The nuclear age compels us to coexist. Rhetorical crusades cannot change that either. A President thus has a dual responsibility: he must resist Soviet expansionism, and he must be conscious of the risks of global confrontation. His policy must embrace both deterrence and coexistence, both containment and an effort to relax tensions.
The Nixon Administration sought a foreign policy that eschewed both moralistic crusading and escapist isolationism. The subtlest critique of our policy held that our emphasis on national interest ran counter to American idealism. On this thesis, Americans must affirm general values or they will lack the resolution and stamina to overcome the Soviet challenge; America must commit itself to a crusade against Communism, not just to geopolitical opposition to Soviet encroachment, or its policy will be based on quicksand. But obsession with ideology may translate into an unwillingness to confront seemingly marginal geopolitical challenges because they appear not to encapsulate the ultimate showdown—and thus lead to a gradual erosion, risking world peace as surely as a failure to face an overall challenge.
Historically, America imagined that it did not have to concern itself with the global equilibrium, because geography and a surplus of power enabled it to await events in isolation. Two schools of thought developed. Liberals treated foreign policy as a subdivision of psychiatry, conservatives as an aspect of theology. Liberals equated relations among states with human relations, emphasizing trust and unilateral gestures of good will. Conservatives saw in foreign policy the eternal struggle of good with evil, a Manichaean conflict that recognized no middle ground and could end only with total victory. Deterrence ran up against liberal ideology and its emotional evocation of peace in the abstract; coexistence grated on the liturgical anti-Communism of the right, for there could be no compromise with the devil.